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It is quite common to expect the avail­ab­il­ity of free and open-​source soft­ware for common needs, such as an oper­at­ing system and an office suite. What is the situ­ation when your needs are much more advanced? Such as, when you are look­ing for an inform­a­tion system for a hos­pital?
Luck­ily, there is such a soft­ware pack­age for an inform­a­tion system for hos­pital needs, called Open­V­istA. Open­V­istA comes from VistA, a public-​funded med­ical system for the United States Depart­ment of Vet­er­ans Affairs. Due to the source of the fund­ing, the source code of the med­ical system has been avail­able with a lib­eral license, and gave birth to Open­V­istA.
An inter­est­ing issue with Open­V­istA is that the backend is writ­ten with the MUMPS pro­gram­ming lan­guage. This pro­gram­ming lan­guage is quite old with syntax dis­sim­ilar to modern lan­guages. How­ever, MUMPS has become pop­u­lar in med­ical care sys­tems and espe­cially VistA. There are people that cri­ti­cize the pro­gram­ming lan­guage; it is import­ant to under­stand that a big piece of soft­ware work­ing well has much more weight over the lan­guage pref­er­ences. In addi­tion, the front-​end is what the end-​user uses, and in our case it is writ­ten with modern pro­gram­ming lan­guages.

Tra­di­tion­ally, the major front-​end of Open­V­istA was writ­ten in Delphi. Quite recently, a new front-​end has been writ­ten, in Mono. Thanks to Mono, the front-​end is cross-​platform and sup­ports i18n (the front-​end can be trans­lated in many writ­ten lan­guages).
You can try out Open­V­istA straight away by down­load­ing the Open­V­istA VMWare appli­ance (image file that con­tains an install­a­tion of an oper­at­ing system, con­figured and ready to use). The spe­cific VMWare appli­ance is based on Xubuntu.
Soft­ware for hos­pit­als is quite expens­ive, and is a luc­rat­ive busi­ness for soft­ware houses. How­ever, when one takes into account that in many coun­tries hos­pit­als are public-​funded, it is easy to under­stand how import­ant it is to use free and open-​source soft­ware in this case. Sadly, in many cases, hos­pit­als make ad-​hoc agree­ments for such soft­ware, res­ult­ing to inef­fi­cient use of public funds.

Tags: i18n, open-source, planetellak //